1. The only thing that matters is the budget.
2. Bureaucracies only grow, never shrink, and the only thing you can control is the rate of growth.
Thanks for sharing another one with us!
http://doc.cat-v.org/economics/parkinsons-law/the-economist-...
What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914 had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the Washington Naval Agreement of that year.
Edit: thanks OP for continuing to post this link, I as well found it enlightening :)
Strong claims like that require strong evidence and a theory of WHY that would (always) be the outcome.
I'm thinking of society as large. That is an organization too. Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
Once that happens, the organisation will promote people who do politics well. It's only a matter of time before the entire organisation is focused on internal politics (apart from the people actually doing the work, who become pawns in political moves). As the organisation grows and the layers expand and more layers of management become disconnected, it gets worse.
In a company, eventually the company will get disrupted and die off. In a government that's not a thing, and it'll just keep expanding and playing politics. This gets worse for government departments headed by a politician, because the politician is very focused on getting something they can boast about to their electorate in the few years they have in the department. And they're usually very familiar with the kinds of political games being played.
Source: We studied this in my MBA, it's a known thing. If I still had my textbooks I could dig out a reference.
I don't have empirical evidence for it, but I can take a stab at a rational explanation.
The second group faces no opposition in their pursuit for control of the organization and its processes.
At best, members of that group will fight among themselves, but certainly won't find resistance from the first group.
Control over various parts of the organization is therefore slowly given to one or more members of the second group.
This grows like a cancer: it starts from the bottom of the pool with people with no much skills, but looking for promotions while people with skills are looking for work results. In some very large companies I worked in (or with), techies focus on work while less competent people become managers; techies regard managers initially as admins that do work techies don't want to, but then the managers take over the organization and make it rot. This is initially far from senior leadership's sight, when it becomes visible it means most of the organization is already affected and it is too late. In most cases HR is helping with this because HR is completely disconnected and not understanding techies and the power dynamics ("those geeks nobody understands") and side with the bureaucrats because HR is also a form of bureaucracy (you don't get in HR is you are a brilliant STEM graduate).
I work in one of those organizations (US legal requirements make it a nightmare)... I even have stock incentives, and I couldn't care less.
Everyone hates “education bureaucrats”, but if the mission is educating children, at some level the state of the institution is critical to that mission.
Just like Christensen’s Dilemma books are mostly just anecdotes combined with patterns in history. As many such business books are.
But in my short time on this planet I’ve seen it in countless forms where I strongly believe it deserves such a title as “iron law”.
> Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
When empires collapse, you get small offshoots starting up somewhere nearby. If you search "tree life cycle" on google images you will see the analogy I'm trying to get at :)
So yes - a very large organisation. However Apple's chip design teams are much, much smaller than that. And because Apple mostly doesn't do chip design those teams are likely able to work like a startup, without much internal politics or in-fighting. Where as all of Intel's 100,000+ employees are basically devoted to chip design and manufacture.
Apple as a whole, though, is starting to look rather sick from the same sort of problems that Intel has. Under Jobs there was an energy and clarity of purpose that's been lacking for some time. The drift in Apple's core businesses are obvious. The iPhone has been stuck in turgid incrementalism for a long time now, and has already been largely "disrupted" by Android which sold into cheaper markets and used that to fund R&D budgets that match Apple's. We don't think of it as disruption because Android arrive so soon after the iPhone and thus there was no obvious delayed "disruption event", Apple just had their market share capped by the refusal to compete on price, which is why Apple fans have for years been forced to make arguments about why Apple is successful because they take a larger profit margin than others.
Their core Mac business has also been adrift for many years now. I and many others actively avoid trying to upgrade because things frequently get worse rather than better. The first decade of the century saw constant innovation in the Mac business, after all their best people were reallocated to the iPhone and iPad, quality entered a long period of decline. macOS releases struggled with regressions and rarely introduced new innovations worth caring about. Their apps and hardware have also stalled with own goals and unforced errors like the keyboard fiasco <looks at butterfly keys with holes in the plastic from ordinary levels of use>.
Developer experience and docs are another area of problems, there was a good rant about it posted here the other day.
All these are due to organisational rot, and most obviously, a form of in-fighting between iOS / macOS in which the iWorld got the best people and resources, leaving macWorld to pathetically try and steal things from the other group occasionally, regardless of whether it made sense for a laptop context or not.
And there's always corruption and politics where there are humans, be it in the mailroom or the boardroom.
Tell that to any college/university in the western world!
There's a reason tuitions have risen so high and it's largely been cited as the ratio of admins to teachers as being at least 10:1 when it used to be much closer.
I personally blame cheap gov subsidized credit for this quickly forming trend, which only took ~2 decades to have a devastating effect on students who come out of school without a degree which can somehow pay back such debt (which we in STEM are fortunate and I personally dropped out early).
Term limits are best implemented where someone must take on a different job every x years. This doesn't solve the problem of entrenched vampiric bureaucrats entirely, but it at least pushes them towards the chopping block.
Liquid democracy is a type of democracy where people give their voting power for particular issues to whoever they trust most for that topic. Then that person may pass the cumulative votes onto someone they trust and believe in. The point of liquid democracy is to empower people who are actual experts in a subject. Rather than having laymen vote in ways that just empower the most socially adept.
The entire skillset involved with gaining power is so time-consuming, it's incredibly rare for someone to have it and an actual technical skill at the same time.
> Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits
> We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection- eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in representative democracy, these findings resolve an empirical puzzle about the disappearance of the effect of term limits on gubernatorial performance over time.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9639960/Alt_Dise...
B: Elected officials are supposed to be the overseeing representatives, rather than functional executives.(think board vs C-suite). Elected executive is overall a poor idea.
It's a shame. I like the idea of not concentrating power.
Three countries with fairly open and competitive elections, and very high levels of corruption and high levels of incumbency:
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/india
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/turkey
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/hungary
Then there are these least corrupt countries, that elect new people all the time:
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/finland
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/new-zealand
Oh... and let's not forget, that the study is about how efficient the governors are... not about corruption at all.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
This (and other organizational failures and technological innovations) is why there will always be startups and small businesses eventually where there was once a big entrenched business or two (or sometimes three).
There is also, of course, whole new industries and niches to be created out of nothing, value and wealth is never a finite pile. It's mostly a matter of human effort to find and break out these new areas. Sometimes just reinventing things as the old talent grows old and dies off, providing value in learning history.